Screwed? Oh please. If you're using some weird software that depends on some nonstandard behavior in the Sunoracle JVM then you deserve to have to support that with a custom JVM installation on your system. There are worse things in the life of a sysadmin. Cry me a river.

Exactly! You already replaced your car's stock water pump with some aftermarket thing, now that's not working out so well for you. So do the right thing and replace that aftermarket water pump with an OEM part like the car came with.

Ubuntu uses OpenJDK Java by default. Users have for years had the option to switch out the default OpenJDK Java for an alternative package in the 3rd party repository which is Sun Java. That alternative is being removed. In fact, it has never been available in the latest Oneiric 11.10 release of ubuntu. In the latest release OpenJDK is the default & the only java available from the package repos.

Most people use OpenJDK on Ubuntu and for them this news means nothing.

If you're using an older release (11.04 or earlier) and you have sun-java installed, simply remove the package & install default-jdk. problem solved.

RSnapshot uses a clever blend of rsync + hard links to do what you want... you can store many incremental backups in just a little more space than a full backup. you can run rsnapshot on a backup server with lots of disk space, and all you need to expose on your target machines is SSH.

you'd create "backup" users on all the target hosts, generate a PKI key pair, and put the private key on your backup server. put the public key in the "backup" account on each target machine so the backup server can securely login without a password. then you just set up rsnapshot to log into your targets and it will use rsync-over-ssh to pull the data.

xee writes: Facebook's new Instant Personalization program gives partner web sites access to your information. Everyone has been opted-in, but no one was notified of their new privacy settings. What's worse, even if you opt-out, information about you will be divulged by your friends who haven't opted-out.

xee writes: The WikiMedia Tech Blog describes todays global outage thusly... "Due to an overheating problem in our European data center many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries.

However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally. This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects."

Isn't Time-Warner the single biggest member of both the MPAA and the RIAA? Why would anyone listen to their obviously biased opinion on this matter? The article is full of misinformation, fear, uncertainty, and doubt: just the kind of sensationalism we love here at slashdot.

First, consider the comparison made at the outset to describe the difference in scale between a home router and a CRS-3. Rather than using a neutral example, like car horsepower, an example is given which puts none other than the vicious T. Rex dinosaur in the position of the CRS-3. What is more understandable to the reader, the big violent dinosaur or the car with 1,000,000 horsepower? Of course both are equally understandable, but they give drastically different impressions.

"As it turns out, these megarouters sitting inside data centers of major telcos and cablecos are among the biggest bottlenecks of the Internet, because as bandwidth speed to end users has shot up in recent years, router technology has not kept up, resulting in traffic jams that can slow or freeze downloads."

You know you can trust TIME Magazine to report on the state of the art in core Internet statistical measurements. Need I say more? These bozos have the audacity to make such a bold claim, without even a hint of statistical data, without attribution to an outside study, without a quote by a recognized expert or even an industry insider. Am I supposed to take author Erik Heinrich's word for it? He's the guy who compares routers to geckos and T. Rexes!

The real story here should be Time-Warner's blatant use of the TIME publication to further it's corporate overlord agenda in collusion with the other members of the Big Media cartel. We'll see much more of this coming from all the usual suspects as we get nearer to a vote on ACTA.

Get a dedicated server running the latest centos or ubuntu server release. Use Xen to run your various applications in dedicated virtual machines. You can encrypt entire domains in a number of ways both internal and external. A dedicated test domain can be set up for your hosting provider to access, etc.